


it is the privilege of the gods to want nothing

by jellyfishheart



Series: gods verse [2]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Summer Camp, Gen, Mention of Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 20:24:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14776670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jellyfishheart/pseuds/jellyfishheart
Summary: Beth comes home from camp and paints her room.





	it is the privilege of the gods to want nothing

**Author's Note:**

> so I wrote this two years ago, wanting to just take a peek at what Beth's life would look like after coming home from her shittiest summer thus far, and held off on publishing it until 'let the gods speak soft of us' was finished. 
> 
> seeing as 'gods' ended in december it's probably finally time for it to exist somewhere other than the cobwebbed folders of google drive. there are a couple more fics in this universe to follow.

 

* * *

 

 

Beth goes home and paints her bedroom walls a dark navy blue.

Her mother protests, a little, at first, wanting to preserve the soft pink of an adolescence split between dresses and soccer uniforms, running her hand over the ruffled bed skirt that Beth later buries in the trash, but Beth’s suitcase sits in the middle of the room like it won’t unpack itself in a place that feels so much like someone else’s and her mother drives her to the store that afternoon.

She tries to help with the drop sheet, too, but Beth takes off her cardigan (wrists out, scars up) and tells her she’d prefer to work alone. It takes two days. It takes every last ounce of energy she has, and it looks beautiful.

Everything from the summer gets shoved into her closet. She should do laundry but her body is so sore and her bed is still shoved into the middle of the room like it too is in the process of leaving and she wants to keep this moment as long as she can, pin it down and preserve it like there’s something of worth in the disassembling.

She naps for five hours. The sun goes down. She can taste the wet paint in the back of her throat when she wakes, the distant sound of a siren out her open window.

Part of her thinks Ali will appear there any second now to yell at her for not calling in the three days they’ve been back. Part of her thinks she should be hoping it’s Paul but she doesn’t want to see either of them and doesn’t want to be staring at the dark space outside the window and doesn’t know how to look away.

When she was a kid she always thought she’d see a face at the window if she glanced over so she dared herself to stare, dared the face to appear, mouth contorted and baring teeth. (She told Paul, once. He laughed and said he’d bring a ladder to her house the next night just to scare her.) (What he didn’t get was after all this time it’d be a relief.)

Her mother is illuminated blue and orange by the TV when Beth goes downstairs, perched on the couch in an otherwise dark room, so still she could be asleep but Beth sees the slight movement of her lips as she echoes the murmurs of the screen and joins her just to stop it. There’s no embarrassment at being caught. Beth wonders if she knows at all and takes an armchair and tries not to think about where her father might be.

 _I’m sorry you didn’t get the kid you wanted_ , Beth told her mother a long time ago, still young enough to not be saying it to wound her, still believing apologies made a difference.

They tried for years, her parents. Thinking they were deserving of a miracle. Reluctantly settling for adoption. So grateful for a baby that _looked like them_ , telling the story in such a way Beth believed for most of her childhood that her existence began when they brought her home. The idea of anything before that just didn’t occur to her when they could point at anything and find themselves in it.

_You have your daddy’s eyes, Bethie._

_That’s your mother’s laugh!_

_Of course she gets her athleticism from her father’s side._

She can see it too. All the ways she wanted to believe. Never mind that she never grew tall enough, or that something inside her was a black hole, devouring all her light.

“What are you watching,” she asks.

For a second she expects to see her mother’s hands occupied by something other than the tissue she twists. Knitting needles, maybe. A box of chocolates. Things that never belonged to the woman who raised her.

“Just some old movie,” her mother says, as if the screen’s in black and white.

But then anything before Beth has never been of any use to her. Beth watches the TV until the scene changes, faces flickering into familiarity.

“Mom, it’s E.T.,” she says.

Her mother seems mildly surprised. “Is it? I didn’t catch the beginning. Have you seen it before?”

Beth rolls her eyes and catches sight of her paint-stained cuticles, starting to pick it off until remembering doing the same thing in the hospital when she noticed whoever cleaned her up missed some blood.

She’d been so calm, in that window of time before her parents showed up. When it was just the nurse who sat with her and talked about this awful book she was reading like Beth wasn’t receiving someone else’s blood with her wrists stitched up.

It was like a brief respite before she had to face what she’d done and what people would think of her and what it meant to have survived. She didn’t consider a single person. She didn’t even flinch when a doctor called her Elizabeth.

 _Just Beth_ , she’d said. But nothing mattered.

She leaves her mother and decides to crawl back into her bed that sits like an unmade island between the drying walls and curls up in the dark, connecting the sounds out the window to one another with a string in her head. Dog. Car. Rustling leaves. Crickets. Car. Sirens. Wind chimes.

She used to like to run at night, when everything felt quiet. She could pretend it was an escape.

They gave her a prescription, in the hospital, for something to help her sleep. She didn’t want it. _It cycles through_ , she wanted to tell them. _I just ride it out. And then I sleep for days and I’m fine again._ But she knew what that would mean for the diagnosis they wanted to give her so she took the pills and tried not to think about it.

When they laid it out she saw all these parts of her, now belonging to some disorder. As if she never really existed at all. As if some tumor ate up all the space where her organs had been, and it turned out she was only breathing because the pulse of it pushed her lungs up and down. Up and down. _You might have noticed a decreased interest in things you used to enjoy._

She thought the smell of the hospital would never leave her, but then she was back at camp and she wanted to shut off her senses. All the goddamn trees, that shitty, weed-filled lake.

Being home is worse than both of those places.

She buys a new comforter the next day, with her mother’s credit card, grey to match her sheets. It replaces the one she got for her twelfth birthday when her mother equated maturity with floral and drilled it into her that this would _see her into adulthood_. She’s eighteen, so. Maybe it did.

She dials Ali’s number in the store then thinks it should probably be Paul she calls first and then calls no one. There’s an email from Sarah she hasn’t wanted to open. She finally swipes the notification away.

The cashier seems to eye her long sleeves as she scans the tag and Beth considers telling her, in her head, smoothing down the words, handing them over soft and polished: _I tried to kill myself a month ago._ She opens her mouth and stares and then the cashier’s telling her the total and Beth’s swiping the card and her long sleeves are forgotten.

She stands in the parking lot anyway, wondering how one even reacts to hearing that. She might need to learn. She has scars now, after all.

She tells it to her mother’s car with the comforter in its zippered case buckled into the passenger seat and lets the words dissolve into the air-conditioning as not a single piece of the vehicle responds. Then she says it again. And laughs. And whispers it.

She sends Paul a text when she’s parked in the driveway, seatbelt cutting into her chest. _Scrubbed off all the camp dirt yet?_

He replies a few minutes later, like he always does, like he waits to make sure he doesn’t seem too eager. It’s the only part of him that really seems to want to be in this relationship anymore. That and when he remembers that she could leave him first.

_Almost died in the shower. Body wasn’t used to the water pressure._

She laughs and sort of misses him, in that removed way that someone misses a person they’ve lost and know they won’t get back. She can see her mother watching through the living room window like sitting in a parked car is another symptom and the doctor’s on speed dial.

She calls Ali as she heads in just so she can wave her mother away, _I’m on the phone_ , arm wrapped around the bulky comforter as she hip-checks the door shut. Her mother’s polite enough to respect a phone call but still hovers the entire five feet from the door to the stairs as Beth wishes she’d taken the cashier up on her offer of a bag.

“It’s not like I was waiting or anything but I’m sure this could be considered rude,” Alison says upon picking up, and Beth plops the comforter onto her bed and kicks a wrinkle out of the drop cloth and smiles.  

“I was painting my room,” Beth says. She sits down on the floor, back against the bed. “You should see it.”

She really does like her room like this, robbed of all its space with the furniture shoved away from the walls. It feels like a rat maze. Some sort of puzzle.

Alison lets a pause grow.

“You know I don’t have unsupervised access to the car,” she finally says.

Beth can play out the rest of the excuses in her head. _I have to work at the store, there’s too much unpacking to be done, there’s too much packing, school’s starting soon, my time is scheduled to the nanosecond…_

She’s known Ali too long to not autofill these things, the sharp, frantic tone always present even in Beth’s head.

“I can pick you up,” she says.

She’s done it before; not often, because she was always splitting her time between track and soccer and Paul when he was available, but a few times she was brazen and took her mother’s car to Ali’s house in Scarborough and left the radio loud and let her cheeks grow hot with Ali in the seat next to her.

 _It really sucks that we moved_ , she’d say a few times, over the radio and wind through the open windows. Just enough to remind her that they’re childhood friends. That she can’t ruin that.

“I’d like to see it,” Alison says, and Beth slides her feet until her legs are stretched out in front of her and she feels the muscles pull.

She really needs to get back in shape. A summer of camp food hasn’t done her any good.

“Today?” she asks.

Her heart flips at the thought, and then she presses a hand to her chest and pushes hard against it and tries to tell herself it’s at the idea of someone seeing this mess like she’s suddenly become her mother and cares about presentation.

“Tomorrow, maybe. I’m working today.”

In the Scarborough house Beth had a bedroom with slanted ceilings that was smothered by the pink paint her mother chose _every time_ , to match the furniture set, she said, like Beth cared, but the closet stayed white and had enough space for two kids to crawl inside and claim it as their own secret spot.

They wrote their names in a heart, behind a box of Beth’s winter clothes. Alison’s name on top with flowery lettering. Beth printed as if she would be graded on it. She left it for the next family; so someone would know they were there, she told herself. So someone might know.

“Okay,” she says.

“Beth, you didn’t call.”

 _I love you_ , she said once, on a sleepover at Ali’s place. They were twelve and she sort of thought Ali was asleep on the other side of the bed, her breathing so even. Their legs were touching.

She wanted to say it felt like being an old married couple but it made her feel gross, like her mother’s griping about her looking too masculine from all the soccer might actually be true, so she shoved that down into a place she couldn’t feel and stopped staring out into the dark and pretended to sleep as well until her body felt heavy.

She convinced herself she dreamt up Ali whispering it back. _I love you too._ But there was a new shyness to the way Ali looked at her in the morning when they were changing out of their pyjamas and Beth decided it was best not to think about it at all.

She’s always been good at compartmentalizing her mistakes. She can’t stop making them but she sure can pretend they never happened.

“You didn’t call,” Alison says again and Beth realizes it’s worry that’s shading her voice.

 _You could’ve been dead_.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I was painting.”

 _I didn’t call Paul either._ She nearly says it. She nearly makes her feel special. But then the vacuum starts downstairs and she remembers who she is and why things happen the way they do.

They make tentative plans for Beth to pick her up tomorrow afternoon, if x-y-z don’t happen and Beth can take the car and the planets align. She’s really getting used to planning things that never pan out. It’s impressive.

The walls are only really a little tacky that night so she moves her furniture back in place, pulling up the drop cloth and finding spaces on the walls to hang her frames. She likes the way her Starry Night poster looks against the navy blue; the way everything moves if she stares long enough. She doesn’t put up her medals this time. She doesn’t put up the picture of her and Paul on their first anniversary, her hair curled.

“It looks good,” her mother says when she comes to inspect, standing in the doorway like the rules have suddenly changed and this space doesn’t belong to her anymore.

It does. It looks different. Like someone who didn’t try to kill herself could live here and not want to die.

Beth takes a sleeping pill and brushes her hair.

She thinks about the suitcase in her closet, full of sand and crafts and cards that spewed glitter onto everything she owns. All her dirty laundry. A bathing suit that’s still probably damp.

She falls asleep under her new comforter with the window open, wind chimes and cars and crickets and sirens finding her through the haze of her disconnected dreams. The taste of paint in the back of her throat has lessened and in every dream she finds herself running; in the dark, in forests and city streets. All her muscles ache. She feels both solid and ephemeral and wants to tell someone sleeping next to her.

She wakes, briefly, to the sound of her own heartbeat. The walls are still navy blue. She’s still alone.

 _You’ve got your whole life ahead of you_ , the nurse had said in the hospital, right before her parents came. And she did; she’d seen it stretched out ahead of her like a long band of rubber. She just wanted to know what would happened if she snipped it.

Turns out it keeps going.


End file.
